{"id":8302,"date":"2017-03-14T11:04:28","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T18:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=8302"},"modified":"2017-03-21T11:08:36","modified_gmt":"2017-03-21T18:08:36","slug":"crystallizing-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2017\/03\/14\/crystallizing-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Crystallizing Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

from NATURE<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The quest to crystallize time<\/h1>\n

Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they\u2019re not.<\/em><\/p>\n

by\u00a0Elizabeth Gibney<\/a><\/p>\n

Nik Spencer\/Nature<\/em><\/p>\n

Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and make basic quantum computers. Last year, he decided to try something seemingly impossible: to create a time crystal.<\/p>\n

The name sounds like a prop from\u00a0Doctor Who<\/i>, but it has roots in actual physics. Time crystals are hypothetical structures that\u00a0pulse without requiring any energy<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so challenging that when Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek\u00a0proposed the provocative concept<\/a>1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0in 2012, other researchers quickly proved there was no way to create time crystals.<\/p>\n

But there was a loophole \u2014 and researchers in a separate branch of physics found a way to exploit the gap. Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and his team used chains of atoms they had constructed for other purposes to make a version of a time crystal2<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0(see\u00a0‘How to create a time crystal’<\/a>). \u201cI would say it sort of fell in our laps,\u201d says Monroe.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NATURE<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from NATURE The quest to crystallize time Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they\u2019re not. by\u00a0Elizabeth Gibney Nik Spencer\/Nature Christopher Monroe spends his life poking at atoms with light. He arranges them into rings and chains and then massages them with lasers to explore their properties and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}